This review contains spoilers
Nostalgia in its purest form. A videogame that is mediocre but lives on for me due to nostalgia.
Story:
It's really bland and stupid. The concept is pretty cool, that you need to build civilizations in the past to restore the future and beat the evil forces of darkness. But in general the story just happens and throws stuff around whenever it wants. The dialoge is super cringey as if I am watching a children's cartoon about learning Spanish. The best part of the game is the opening where Max flees from the clowns and beats them up. I rewatched that scene hundreds of times as a kid and it was the funniest shit I had ever seen. It's not as impactful today as it was in my childhood, but I still like it. The story is not the reason I like this game at all.
Characters:
The same with the story. Stupid and cringey. I like Max' character design A LOT. So much in fact that I tried to walk around with his outfit in real life which was also pretty cringe. Monica is just the exposition character and also very boring. The villains are stupid or just there. Not the strong point of the game.
Music:
The music is AMAZING. It has so much charm with a lot of bangers in there. I also like the French inspirations of Palm Brinks. Generally it is very good all around.
Gameplay:
The systems are more fun than the actual fighting. Though the fighting is still fun. It feels very slow and clunky, especially for someone who is used to the Kingdom Hearts action gameplay. But it is still fine. The best part is traversing through the randomly generated dungeons, finding awesome loot and upgrading your weapons. That is easily the best part of the game and also the thing you do the most - which is very good. In addition to that every chapter has a new visual and auditive style for the random dungeons which are all cool and keep things fresh. I only like to play as Max with is main weapon though. I was never really interested in the guns, Monica, the Ridepod or the Monsterforms. Also the invention system is boring because I don't like taking pictures of stuff in general in games and without a guide you will never be able to find anything. I just run through the dungeons, upgrade my wrench and buy seal breaking scrolls whenever possible. That is the most fun to me. But even though this is fun the game has one big problem: the length. I just said that just running through the dungeons and enjoying the gameplay loop is fun, but it way overstays it's welcome. Sometimes you need to do over 10 dungeons in a row with no changes of the pacing whatsoever until you get a 5 minute cutscene to just do 2 hours of dungeons crawling again. They could have just cut the amount of levels by 2/3 and the general pacing of the game would have been way better. The problem is that you have to do most dungeons to find the geostones to provide story progression - it wouldn't have become such a slog if most dungeons at least weren't obligatory. The minigames are cool though and the fact that you can play them in almost every dungeon after defeating all enemies is pretty cool. The music that plays after clearing a floor is also very soothing and fitting for these minigames. It is also very charming that the tutorials are prerecorded videos where the side characters explain what is happening on screen.
Content:
If you want to 100% the game, it is VERY LONG. You can do rediculously many things. Sadly most of that content is boring and I always stick to the core game.
Replay value:
The only replay reason there is, is that you can start a new game with all costumes you have unlocked in your previous save files. That is cool, but that's about it. I still like to replay it occasionally because it just has it's charm to run through the dungeons and upgrade your equipment. It's kind of like my personal favorite Diablo.
Conclusion:
A very cool game that suffers a lot from early gaming era illnesses. There is a lot of unnecessary fluff that is just there to show that there is a lot do to but without the actual fun and quality that belongs to fun content. But the core of the game is really really fun gameplay wise.
Story:
It's really bland and stupid. The concept is pretty cool, that you need to build civilizations in the past to restore the future and beat the evil forces of darkness. But in general the story just happens and throws stuff around whenever it wants. The dialoge is super cringey as if I am watching a children's cartoon about learning Spanish. The best part of the game is the opening where Max flees from the clowns and beats them up. I rewatched that scene hundreds of times as a kid and it was the funniest shit I had ever seen. It's not as impactful today as it was in my childhood, but I still like it. The story is not the reason I like this game at all.
Characters:
The same with the story. Stupid and cringey. I like Max' character design A LOT. So much in fact that I tried to walk around with his outfit in real life which was also pretty cringe. Monica is just the exposition character and also very boring. The villains are stupid or just there. Not the strong point of the game.
Music:
The music is AMAZING. It has so much charm with a lot of bangers in there. I also like the French inspirations of Palm Brinks. Generally it is very good all around.
Gameplay:
The systems are more fun than the actual fighting. Though the fighting is still fun. It feels very slow and clunky, especially for someone who is used to the Kingdom Hearts action gameplay. But it is still fine. The best part is traversing through the randomly generated dungeons, finding awesome loot and upgrading your weapons. That is easily the best part of the game and also the thing you do the most - which is very good. In addition to that every chapter has a new visual and auditive style for the random dungeons which are all cool and keep things fresh. I only like to play as Max with is main weapon though. I was never really interested in the guns, Monica, the Ridepod or the Monsterforms. Also the invention system is boring because I don't like taking pictures of stuff in general in games and without a guide you will never be able to find anything. I just run through the dungeons, upgrade my wrench and buy seal breaking scrolls whenever possible. That is the most fun to me. But even though this is fun the game has one big problem: the length. I just said that just running through the dungeons and enjoying the gameplay loop is fun, but it way overstays it's welcome. Sometimes you need to do over 10 dungeons in a row with no changes of the pacing whatsoever until you get a 5 minute cutscene to just do 2 hours of dungeons crawling again. They could have just cut the amount of levels by 2/3 and the general pacing of the game would have been way better. The problem is that you have to do most dungeons to find the geostones to provide story progression - it wouldn't have become such a slog if most dungeons at least weren't obligatory. The minigames are cool though and the fact that you can play them in almost every dungeon after defeating all enemies is pretty cool. The music that plays after clearing a floor is also very soothing and fitting for these minigames. It is also very charming that the tutorials are prerecorded videos where the side characters explain what is happening on screen.
Content:
If you want to 100% the game, it is VERY LONG. You can do rediculously many things. Sadly most of that content is boring and I always stick to the core game.
Replay value:
The only replay reason there is, is that you can start a new game with all costumes you have unlocked in your previous save files. That is cool, but that's about it. I still like to replay it occasionally because it just has it's charm to run through the dungeons and upgrade your equipment. It's kind of like my personal favorite Diablo.
Conclusion:
A very cool game that suffers a lot from early gaming era illnesses. There is a lot of unnecessary fluff that is just there to show that there is a lot do to but without the actual fun and quality that belongs to fun content. But the core of the game is really really fun gameplay wise.